The platform focuses on ongoing support rather than one-time projects.

Kickstarter campaigns are built around specific, isolated projects and aren’t meant to sustain creators on an ongoing basis — until now. On Wednesday, Kickstarter launched a new product, Drip, “a tool for people to fund and build community around their ongoing creative practice…through the recurring support of fans, friends, and new audiences.”

Drip is Kickstarter’s answer to Patreon, which launched in 2013 and focuses on ongoing support for people rather than projects, and now counts more than 50,000 active creators and 1 million active “patrons.” But “competition or market share is a backward way of thinking about this,” said Perry Chen, Kickstarter founder and chairman. “I think the more tools for creators, the better. We wanted to make something expansive — introduce a tool that is a step forward and also maybe speaks to a larger group of creators that, to date, haven’t felt that existing tools resonate with them.” (A product called Drip originally launched in 2011 as a way for fans to support musicians with subscriptions; in 2016, Drip faced shutdown, until Kickstarter took it over.)

Drip is invite-only for now, and will open up more broadly next year. It charges a 5 percent fee on subscription payments, plus an additional credit card processing charge. Chen sees Drip and Kickstarter as “separate but complementary products,” and believes there will be crossover between them: Creators may use the products at different times in their careers, for instance. And existing Kickstarter users can support Drip creators from their accounts.